Buddhist Documentaries and Films: Who Made Them

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 September 2026

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Buddhist documentaries and dramas are usually listed together, and they should not be. Three different kinds of film get sold under one label: films made from inside a tradition by practitioners, films by Asian directors working inside Buddhist societies, and Western films that use a monastery as scenery. This page sorts them and says which is which.

The distinction changes what a film can tell you. A film can be beautiful and still be a projection. A film can be clumsy and still be the only one anybody made from inside.

How we sorted them

We give a director, a year and a country only where a durable source carries them — a film’s own site, a public broadcaster, a museum, a festival record, a university catalogue, a distributor’s catalogue — and where records disagree we say so rather than pick. Every such source is listed with its URL in this page’s sources, and every page we relied on was opened and every date here checked on 21 September 2026. Where a credit has no source, we do not print it.

The categories describe the film, not the filmmaker’s faith. Khyentse Norbu also directed Vara: A Blessing (2013, Bhutan/Hong Kong/Sri Lanka, 96 minutes), which appears on Buddhist film lists purely because a lama made it; the Dharamshala festival record describes Hindu gods, classical Indian dance and a temple dancer wed to a Hindu god. A film made by a Buddhist teacher is not automatically a Buddhist film.

Documentaries: start here if you want to learn

The Buddha (David Grubin, 2010) is the safest single recommendation for someone who wants to learn rather than to watch a good film: two hours for PBS, built from animation, two millennia of Buddhist art and footage shot in India and Nepal, with an Emmy nomination for documentary writing and a Webby. Two hours cannot hold the competing traditional accounts of one life, so read it against the historical Buddha and the life as the tradition tells it.

Monastic life, filmed from inside

• Amongst White Clouds (Edward A. Burger) follows hermit masters in the Zhongnan Mountains of Shaanxi; Burger is a practitioner who began filming with his teacher’s blessing. The review the MCLC Resource Center republished dates the journey the film opens with — Burger boarding a train to Shaanxi — to 2003, but gives no production year, and the years that circulate elsewhere disagree, so we give none.
• One Mind (Burger, 2017 per that same review, completed at Zhenru Chan Monastery in Jiangxi) gives the clearest statement of the distinction this page is making. His own site describes it as “a documentary that is not ‘about’ Buddhism, but rather a ‘Buddhist film’”, and the MCLC review reports him saying much the same in an interview. Long stretches of head-shaving and tea-picking, and one of very few films about Buddhism in China rather than Tibet.
• To the Land of Bliss (Wen-jie Qin, China, 47 minutes; Documentary Educational Resources dates it 2001, Stanford’s Ho Center guide 2002, so we give both) is worth more than its length suggests. Qin, an anthropologist, returned to Sichuan in 1998 to research the post-Mao revival of Buddhism; while she was on Mount Emei — whose Leshan Giant Buddha is one of the greatest Buddhist monuments — an eminent monk named Jue Chang died, and the film became a record of his community escorting his body through a rite of fire and his consciousness to the Land of Bliss of Amita Buddha. Pure Land as practised and died in, rather than as founded. See Buddhist funerals.
• Walk With Me (Marc J. Francis and Max Pugh) follows Thich Nhat Hanh — Vietnamese Zen, Thiền, in the Plum Village community he founded — through four seasons, with Benedict Cumberbatch reading his early journals, a detail the film’s own site carries though Plum Village’s page does not. Plum Village states that it granted long-term access to documentary filmmakers for the first time in its history, hosts the film on its own site, and dates its premiere to SXSW in 2017.

The tulku question, from both sides

A tulku is a teacher held to be the rebirth of a previous one. Two documentaries take it from opposite ends, and few lists carry both.

• Unmistaken Child (Nati Baratz; ITVS records a 7 April 2010 broadcast premiere in a 90-minute cut) follows a great Tibetan monk’s “shy, gifted disciple”, in ITVS’s words, on the task of finding the child who is his master’s rebirth — a task set by the Dalai Lama. It shows a small child identified, tested and taken from his parents, and declines to editorialise, which is the reason to watch it.
• My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 90 minutes, PBS POV premiere 21 June 2012) takes the other end: Chögyal Namkhai Norbu’s Western-born son Yeshi, recognised at birth, spends twenty years not wanting the life. An audience award at IDFA in 2010.

For what the belief actually claims, see rebirth and reincarnation.

Nuns, not monks

• Daughters of Wisdom (Bari Pearlman, United States, 2007, 68 minutes) was filmed at Kala Rongo Monastery in Nangchen, north-eastern Tibet, among nearly 300 nuns receiving religious and educational training previously unavailable to them.
• Blessings: The Tsoknyi Nangchen Nuns of Tibet (Victress Hitchcock, 90 minutes, narrated by Richard Gere) covers, in Stanford’s words, three thousand women practising an ancient yogic tradition in remote nunneries and hermitages in the same region — following Western women who go to meet them. A visitor’s film, not an insider’s. Stanford’s Ho Center guide dates it 2009; the director’s own site dates the journey it records to 2005 and gives no production year, so we have not settled it.
• Bhikkhunī – Buddhism, Sri Lanka, Revolution is the one that leaves Tibet, and it is the gap in our own research rather than an entry we can stand behind. Stanford’s Ho Center guide lists it for 2018, in the Theravāda world and on the live argument over full ordination for women. We have not verified its credits against a production, festival or distributor record, so we name no director and no runtime.

Three, and they are not interchangeable. That is still a thin shelf beside the films about monks — and thinner on our page than it is in the world. Stanford’s guide runs a twelve-title section headed “Women Across Buddhist Traditions”, with Chinese, Nepali and Sri Lankan films we have not yet verified to this page’s standard. We will add them as we do. See the life of a Buddhist nun and women in Buddhism.

Meditation inside prisons

• Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (Eilona Ariel and Ayelet Menahemi, 1997, 52 minutes, Karuna Films) covers the courses run at Tihar Jail in New Delhi under Kiran Bedi, whom the filmmakers’ own site calls India’s first woman Inspector General of Prisons.
• The Dhamma Brothers (Jenny Phillips, Anne Marie Stein and Andrew Kukura, 76 minutes) covers a ten-day retreat inside Donaldson Correctional Facility, which its distributor’s catalogue calls the first maximum-security prison in North America to hold an extended vipassanā retreat. Bullfrog Films, that distributor, gives a US release date of 2008 — eleven years after the Indian film, though the American one is the one people know.

Both show the S. N. Goenka lineage of vipassanā, taught as a non-sectarian technique rather than as religion — which is why the courses can run in a state prison at all. See vipassana meditation.

Buddhism as a public force

• Burma VJ (Anders Østergaard, 2008, with the Democratic Voice of Burma) is the primary record of the 2007 Saffron Revolution, shot handheld by undercover Burmese video journalists and smuggled out — DVB’s own page for the film says both. A Western reader’s image of a monk is a silent meditator; in Myanmar in 2007 the monks were the opposition.
• And the same robes have been on the other side of Burmese public life. A current of Buddhist nationalism, associated with monks including Ashin Wirathu, fed anti-Muslim hostility in the years before and after the 2017 Rohingya catastrophe — our page on Buddhism in Myanmar sets out that record and the monastic disavowals that followed. Stanford’s Ho Center guide lists a 2017 documentary called The Venerable W. in its Burmese section; we have not verified its credits to this page’s standard, so we point at it rather than describe it. But a list that runs only Burma VJ is choosing the flattering half of one country.
• Tibet in Song (Ngawang Choephel) is about Tibetan folk music and cultural survival, not doctrine. The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy recorded that Chinese authorities arrested the director in August 1995 while he was travelling in Tibet — he had gone, in his own words, “to research and collect as many folk songs as I could” — and that by November 1996 he had been held incommunicado for more than fourteen months without charge or trial, suspected of gathering “sensitive intelligence” and of “illegal separatist activities”. He was imprisoned for years afterwards; we could not reach a source that let us verify the length of his sentence or the date of his release, so we give neither. It is still the sharpest illustration of why so many films about Tibet were made by foreigners.
• Buddha’s Lost Children (Mark Verkerk, Netherlands, 2006, 97 minutes) follows Phra Khru Bah, a former Thai boxer turned monk, running the Golden Horse Temple as orphanage, school and clinic — Thai practice as social work.
• Agent of Happiness (Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbo) follows a surveyor measuring contentment for Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index. The Sundance Institute, which premiered it in 2024 and calls it the first Bhutanese-Hungarian co-production, quotes the filmmakers on wanting to see “what can and can not be measured in life” — it complicates the index rather than celebrating it.
• Wheel of Time (Werner Herzog, Germany/Italy, 2003, 80 minutes) films a Kalachakra gathering: MUBI’s record describes an initiation rite performed by the Dalai Lama in India in 2002, with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims arriving over six weeks and the mandala finally dissolving into the wind. Herzog is interested in the pilgrims’ endurance and offers no kind of instruction. Accounts differ over how much of the Indian initiation was completed, and we could not settle that against a durable record.

One teacher, told one way

Crazy Wisdom (Johanna Demetrakas, 2011) is a biography of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who did as much as anyone to plant Tibetan Buddhism in North America. Writing in Buddhadharma, the scholars Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg record that Trungpa “died of alcohol-related complications at age forty-eight, openly slept with female students, some of whom have alleged they were subject to physical and emotional violence from him”. The director’s approach is also on the record: she told Lion’s Roar that the dharma art, poetry, humour, drinking, girlfriends and military elements were all “offsprings of his genius”, and that she wanted the audience to have “enough time to form their own opinions about it”. Know both before you watch.

Dramas: films, not lessons

If you want one: Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?. It is the best film on this page and it was made from inside a Buddhist culture by someone who was not a filmmaker. If two hours of a mountain monastery in near-silence is not your evening, start with The Cup instead — monks scheming to watch a football match, funny, and made by a lama.

Korea

Korean cinema has gone back to the monastery again and again — the features below run from 1981 to 2003 — and almost none of them turn up on English-language lists.

• Mandala (Im Kwon-taek, 1981, 117 minutes) sets a young monk against an elder monk, Jisan, who in the San Francisco International Film Festival’s archive record “turns out to be the most unconventional of Buddhists: he drinks liquor, eats meat and is far from celibate” — the corrective to any assumption that a film from inside a Buddhist culture will be pious.
• Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (Bae Yong-kyun, South Korea, 1989, 137 minutes) puts an old master, a young monk and an orphaned boy in a mountain monastery. The title is a kōan, not a plot question; it is not answered.
• Come, Come, Come Upward (Im Kwon-taek, 1988, 123 minutes, per the Festival des 3 Continents) follows Sun-Nyo, expelled from school, into a convent and out again. It is one of very few East Asian features centred on a woman’s monastic life, and is almost never listed in English. Content note below.
• A Little Monk (Joo Kyung-jung, 2002, 102 minutes, per the Wexner Center for the Arts) is the gentlest of them: a nine-year-old raised in a mountain temple, longing for a mother he cannot remember.
• Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003, South Korea, 103 minutes per the Yale film notes; MUBI’s record adds Germany and gives 105) is the one most readers have seen, and it needs two notes. Kim said on the record that it was “not a religious film” and that its religious elements “offer a return to Mother Nature and innocence” — a statement rarely printed beside Andrew Sarris’s line that the film “probably represents the purest and most transcendent distillation of the Buddhist faith ever rendered on the screen”. And the director: an actress accused him of physical and sexual assault; on 28 October 2020 the Seoul Western District Court dismissed his defamation suit against her and the broadcaster MBC and ordered him to pay costs, and prosecutors had earlier issued a summary fine of five million won for assault and dropped the other charges, citing a lack of physical evidence. That October 2020 ruling is where the record we were able to verify ends. We state it and leave the decision with you.

See Buddhism in Korea for the Seon tradition behind them all.

Japan: a Zen founder, a Pure Land founder, and a film about death

• Zen (Banmei Takahashi, Japan, 2009, 127 minutes) dramatises Dōgen, who brought Sōtō Zen to Japan.
• Shinran: Path to Purity (Rentaro Mikuni, 1987) is the counterweight, and the most important title here for balance: a biography of Shinran, whom the Berkeley Art Museum’s note calls the leader of “the most important of the Pure Land sects, Shinshu”, and who “inaugurated marriage into the priesthood”. The year and the film’s Cannes Jury Prize come from the awards list of Shochiku, its own Japanese studio, not from a resource guide. Pure Land has almost no presence on English-language film lists.
• Departures (Yōjirō Takita, Japan, 2008, 131 minutes) was, in MUBI’s words, the surprise winner of the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Its subject is nōkan, the ritual preparation of the body that precedes a Japanese funeral, and its Buddhism is ambient rather than taught. See Buddhist funerals.
• The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, Japan, 1956, 116 minutes) has a Japanese soldier in Burma take a monk’s robes at the end of the war — a Japanese film using a Burmese setting to work through Japanese war guilt. Calling it a film about Burmese Buddhism would be exactly the flattening this page is against.

More context at Buddhism in Japan.

The Himalaya, from inside

• The Cup (Khyentse Norbu, 1999) has young refugee monks scheming to watch the 1998 World Cup final — made by a Tibetan lama, cast with the monastery’s own monks and its real abbot. ACMI calls it the first film released in the Tibetan language; Tricycle called it the first Tibetan story told in US cinemas from a Tibetan point of view. Records disagree on where it was shot, so we say nothing about that.
• Travellers and Magicians (Khyentse Norbu, 2003, Bhutan/Australia, 108 minutes) nests a monk’s tale inside a hitchhiking journey. The nested story is a teaching device, not a subplot.
• Milarepa (Neten Chokling, 2006, 90 minutes) covers the sorcery and revenge of Milarepa’s early life and stops there; the Spurlock Museum’s record, the only one we could verify, carries no production country, so we give none. A viewer who comes for the Hundred Thousand Songs will be surprised.
• Honeygiver Among the Dogs (Dechen Roder, 2016, Bhutan, 136 minutes) is a Bhutanese noir in which a detective investigating a disappearance becomes entangled with a woman called the Demoness. Roder is also the only woman among the Bhutanese and Tibetan directors on this page.
• Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (Pawo Choyning Dorji, Bhutan) was shot, its director told Tricycle, at an altitude of 15,000 feet in a hamlet with no electricity or running water: “we shot on one camera, and only charged what was essential”, off solar batteries, on the days there was sun. It became Bhutan’s first Oscar nominee, for Best International Feature at the 94th Academy Awards in 2022. No monks at its centre, which is why it is here: it shows a Buddhist society at the level of a village school.
• The Monk and the Gun (Dorji, 2023, Bhutan/France, 107 minutes) is a satire set around Bhutan’s first democratic elections, in which an old lama sends a monk to fetch him a gun. The reason is the joke, so we will not spoil it.

Tibet, filmed by a Tibetan

Pema Tseden (1969–2023) is the largest gap in almost every competing list, which prefers Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet — films about Tibetans made by Westerners. He was born, Film Quarterly records, into a nomadic herder’s family in Thrika County in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai Province, and is “known widely as China’s first Tibetan director of feature films”. The tribute notes that the films of the Tibetan directors he mentored have “led to frequent references to a ‘Tibetan New Wave’”, and quotes Variety’s Patrick Frater calling him a “pioneer” of it. His debut, The Silent Holy Stones (China, 2005, 102 minutes), sends a young monk home for the New Year, where he falls in love with television. Seven more followed, from The Search (2009) to Snow Leopard (2023), whose edit had been completed when he died, and including Jinpa (2018), which took the Orizzonti award at Venice for its screenplay, and Balloon (2019). Film Quarterly writes that “the religious customs of everyday life are central” to his cinema. Start with Balloon, where a Tibetan belief about rebirth, set against state birth policy, is the engine of the plot.

Southeast Asia

• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, UK/Thailand/France/Germany/Spain, 114 minutes) was, in the Walker Art Center’s words, inspired by a book by the Buddhist abbot Phra Sripariyattiweti. It is the most important Theravāda-world film here and the one lists handle worst, because it does not look devotional. It is slow and unexplained on purpose.
• The Monk (The Maw Naing, 2014, Czech Republic/Myanmar, 95 minutes) and Golden Kingdom (Brian Perkins, Myanmar, 2015) share a country and nearly a subject — novices left to themselves when the abbot is taken out of the picture, by illness in one film and by a long journey in the other. Watch them together. The Maw Naing’s is deliberately unspiritual, a film about a boy deciding whether to stay; Tricycle called Perkins’s the first international feature shot in Burma since the country reopened, a window that ran from around 2011 and closed with the 2021 coup.
• Mindfulness and Murder (Tom Waller, Thailand, 2011) is the least reverent film here and earns its place for it: a murder mystery in a Bangkok monastery. Tricycle, which describes Waller as an Irish-Thai filmmaker, reports him showing monks smoking, tattooed and mixed up in drugs, and an abbot handing out lottery numbers and blessing a newly opened 7-Eleven. “I’m not as kreng jai as Thai people usually are with monks,” he told the magazine — his view of the institution, not a description of Thai Buddhism.

The Western films, and what they are actually doing

The Western image of the Buddha on film starts before Hollywood. Prem Sanyas (The Light of Asia, 1925), directed by Franz Osten and produced by and starring Himansu Rai, is the earliest Buddhist-subject feature we can point to that still exists. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival calls it “the first Indian film to be distributed internationally”, notes that “only two percent of almost 1,300 films shot in India between 1913 and 1934 survive”, and records that it exists at all because the National Film Archive of India restored it. It reaches the Buddha through Edwin Arnold’s 1879 English poem rather than through a tradition.

The answer to it took the better part of a century. Sri Siddhartha Gautama (Saman Weeraman) tells the same life from inside a Theravāda country: its Sri Lankan distributor, EAP Films, records it as a project of the Light of Asia Foundation of Sri Lanka, produced by the foundation’s chairman Navin Guneratne, from a script “approved by the supreme council of the Maha Sangha”. The distributor’s own page gives conflicting release dates, so we give no year. It is the only life-of-the-Buddha feature here made by a Buddhist body inside the tradition it depicts, and it is on none of the English-language lists we checked.

Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1993) is the famous title that does not deserve its standing, and the criticism is published rather than ours. The critic Adrian Martin calls it “a full-on film of religious meditation and instruction, but essentially a primer designed for children or adults who have never heard of Buddhism”, says it “often comes over as pop mysticism, Spielberg-style”, and places it in a run of late-Bertolucci capitulations — dismissing socialism in The Last Emperor, indulging “a bit of good old Orientalism” in The Sheltering Sky, and in Little Buddha embracing “the most patriarchal of religious mythologies”. He also finds the experience “strange enough to savour”. Eve Mullen’s 1998 article in the Journal of Religion & Film makes the scholarly case against this film, Seven Years in Tibet (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1997, UK/US, 136 minutes) and Kundun together; we cite it for the existence of that argument, having read only its abstract.

MUBI’s catalogue copy for Seven Years in Tibet introduces Heinrich Harrer as “an Austrian national and a Nazi sympathizer” who leaves Austria in 1939 to climb the Himalayas, and says that “there Heinrich’s life changes forever”. That is the shape of the film: Tibet as the place a European changes, with the Tibetans as the setting for it, and it is the shape Mullen’s argument is about.

Kundun (Martin Scorsese, United States/Monaco, 1997, 129 minutes, per MUBI’s record) deserves a fairer hearing than it gets. PBS Frontline’s own note on the film records that China would not allow it to be made in Tibet, so it was shot mostly in Morocco using many Tibetans as actors; in the interview itself Scorsese recalls asking an older Tibetan actor to play anger and being told, “I’ll try, but I don’t know how to get angry.” He does not present himself as an authority on the subject — “I don’t know too much about the politics,” he says of Tibet. It is still a film made in Morocco by an American Catholic about a living tradition, and Mullen puts it in the same frame as the other two. Both are true.

Samsara (Pan Nalin, 2001, 2 hours 18 minutes; ACMI credits Germany and says the film is set in Ladakh) is the most commercially packaged film on the page. Enlightenment Guaranteed (Doris Dörrie, Germany, 1999, 108 minutes, per the Harvard Film Archive) is the useful contrast with Little Buddha: two German brothers get hopelessly lost on the way to a Zen monastery in Japan, and it knows the joke is on the Westerners rather than on the monastery.

For the whole argument without an argument, watch the two Milarepas. Milarepa (Liliana Cavani, Italy, 1974, 108 minutes) films the yogi’s autobiography, as MUBI’s record puts it, “parallel with a story of a youth of our days”. Neten Chokling’s, thirty-two years later, just tells the story.

What is missing here, and from every other list

This list is heavily Vajrayāna and Zen. That is a fact about what gets funded and subtitled into English, not about the size of the traditions.

• Theravāda cinema reachable in English is thin, and most of what reaches us was made with outside money — a Dutch documentary about a Thai monk, a Czech co-production about a Burmese novice. The exceptions are the point: a Sri Lankan foundation’s own life of the Buddha, and a Thai auteur who does not explain himself.
• Pure Land has two entries here, a founder biography and a forty-seven-minute funeral. That is not proportion.
• Nichiren is the gap we can least explain, and it is ours rather than the tradition’s. Stanford’s Ho Center guide lists Nichiren (1979) in its Japanese section. We have not verified that film’s credits against a production, festival or distributor record, so we give it as a pointer rather than an entry — but we will not report an absence in the world when what we actually have is an absence in our research. See Nichiren Buddhism.
• Vietnamese Buddhism appears once, and in a film made by Western directors.
• Every filmmaker in our “from inside a tradition” row is a man. Women directed or co-directed films across this page — Demetrakas, Fox, Pearlman, Hitchcock, Qin, Ariel, Menahemi, Stein, Cavani, Dörrie, Zurbo, Roder — and Dechen Roder is the only one of them in the middle row of the table above, filming a Buddhist society from inside it.

One more pattern, and it is about this page’s neighbours as much as this page: the films, books and podcasts we can recommend in English are overwhelmingly Western-produced, while the monuments are almost entirely Asian — so read in sequence our own lists can imply that Asians built Buddhism and Westerners explain it, which is a fact about who gets funded and translated, not about the tradition.

A list that does not admit this is presenting a Tibetan-and-Zen selection as “Buddhism”. Where a film and our pages disagree, common misconceptions about Buddhism is the place to check.

Where to watch, and what is free

We name no streaming service: rights move, and a page that lists them is wrong inside a year. Three routes that move more slowly.

A library card. Many public and university libraries pay for streaming platforms that carry documentary and world-cinema titles at no cost to the cardholder. It is the least glamorous answer on this page and the one most likely to still work when the page is old.

The filmmakers themselves. Where a film’s makers host it, that is the link to follow. Karuna Films links a full version of Doing Time, Doing Vipassana from its own site, and Plum Village links Walk With Me from its own page. Both were still there on 21 September 2026.

Everything else costs money, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The Buddhist Film Foundation’s own Buddhist Film Channel, when it arrives, is to be pay-per-view rental and download-to-own by the foundation’s own description. If a title here matters to you, search its title with the director’s name and go to whichever page the filmmakers control. And if the problem is that you have no two free hours, the best Buddhist podcasts is the companion to this page: the same traditions, in forty minutes, while you do something else.

Content notes

Named plainly so you can choose, and no further.

• Come, Come, Come Upward — sexual violence against the central character.
• Departures — the handling of the dead throughout, including a child. Gentle rather than gruesome, but if you have been recently bereaved you may want to wait.
• The Dhamma Brothers — the men at its centre are serving sentences for murder, and the crimes are discussed.
• Burma VJ — footage of a violent crackdown, including killings.
• Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring — real animals are weighted with stones on screen.

Where to go next

If you have already seen the famous ones. If Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet, Little Buddha and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring are behind you, you have seen three films made about Buddhists from outside and one made inside a Buddhist country. The next four are Come, Come, Come Upward, Balloon, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and One Mind — a Korean nun, a Tibetan family, a Thai forest and a Chinese monastery, none of them explaining anything to you. That is the whole argument of this page in four evenings.

The Buddhist Film Foundation was founded in 2000, its own About page says, by the filmmakers Ellen Bruno, Richard Kohn and Gaetano Kazuo Maida “along with others”, out of earlier work by Tricycle magazine. Its programmes are the International Buddhist Film Festival and the Buddhist Film Channel. Be realistic about both: when we checked the foundation’s site on 21 September 2026, the Buddhist Film Channel was still marked “Coming Soon!” and 2021 was the most recent festival edition the site referenced. We point at the foundation rather than at a platform because a non-commercial curator of this cinema is likelier to outlast this page — not because we can promise you a working play button.

Maida and Steven Goodman put the case in Inquiring Mind in spring 2002, arguing for “a very large tent” and, in Goodman’s words, for expanding the opportunity for “ethnic-based Buddhists — the Thais, the Tibetans, the Burmese — to represent themselves”. That was a practitioner-curator naming, in 2002, the problem this page is still working on.

(For what the films are showing: a day in a monastery and the life of a Buddhist monk. For the places they film, the greatest Buddhist monuments. For why so much of this was made in the West, Buddhism in the West and famous Buddhists. For reading instead of watching, the best Buddhist books and Buddhist apps and free online resources.)